Comments on: Charles Cushman and the discovery of Old World colorhttps://blog.oup.com/2012/03/charles-cushman-world-color/
Academic insights for the thinking world.Wed, 21 Feb 2018 15:25:18 +0000hourly1https://wordpress.org/?v=4.7.9By: OUPblog » Blog Archive » Off the Roadhttps://blog.oup.com/2012/03/charles-cushman-world-color/#comment-280213
Mon, 25 Jun 2012 10:31:35 +0000http://blog.oup.com/?p=22082#comment-280213[…] and author of St. Louis: The Evolution of an American Urban Landscape. Read his previous blog posts “Charles Cushman and the discovery of Old World color,” “Bits and Pieces of the Mother Road,” and “Kodachrome […]
]]>By: OUPblog » Blog Archive » Kodachrome Americahttps://blog.oup.com/2012/03/charles-cushman-world-color/#comment-279512
Tue, 19 Jun 2012 10:30:13 +0000http://blog.oup.com/?p=22082#comment-279512[…] talk at Left Bank Books in Saint Louis, MO on June 21 at 7:00 p.m. Read his previous blog posts “Charles Cushman and the discovery of Old World color” and “Bits and Pieces of the Mother […]
]]>By: OUPblog » Blog Archive » Bits and Pieces of the Mother Roadhttps://blog.oup.com/2012/03/charles-cushman-world-color/#comment-278669
Sun, 10 Jun 2012 10:30:20 +0000http://blog.oup.com/?p=22082#comment-278669[…] Traveling Cushman’s route west in the past week, I am struck both by how full and how fragmented our view of the American roadscape has become. Route 66 exists so completely in our literary memories, our imaginations, our online search options, that even the faintest of efforts can serve to satisfy the curiosity that took a man of his generation many years to settle. As with every other aspect of our networked world, such access cuts both ways. While access to information democratizes our ability to fashion a coherent picture of the landscape, it furthers the atomization of our social and spatial selves. Locked in our homes, we open Google Maps for a 360-degree view of any square foot of the highway. On our GPS devices and our Mapquest searches, we break down the full experience of travel into a million randomly ranked impressions; “continue west 734.5 miles” takes up less space in our brains than “south 37 feet to unmarked intersection, take a soft right onto eastbound access road.” We know everything and we know nothing about the spaces through which we move. El Vado Motel, Central Ave. (US Highway 66), Albuquerque, NM. Photos by Eric Sandweiss. Today’s Route 66 is broken into pieces and symbols, shorn of its practical functions even as it is elevated in its “imageability.” To an extent I have to blame not just Steinbeck but Charles Cushman and the millions like him — men and women who accepted the challenge that car companies, chambers of commerce, and camera manufacturers across America laid before them. “See the USA” and appreciate the road — as I am on my own drive this month — not for what it enables us to accomplish as a society, but for what it allows us to experience as individuals. Eric Sandweiss is Carmony Professor of History at Indiana University. He is the author of The Day in Its Color: Charles Cushman’s Photographic Journey Through a Vanishing America, co-author of Eadweard Muybridge and the Photographic Panorama of San Francisco (winner of Western History Association’s Kerr prize for best illustrated book), and author of St. Louis: The Evolution of an American Urban Landscape. Read his previous blog post “Charles Cushman and the discovery of Old World color.” […]
]]>